Halliday v. Sturm

• Decision Date: 25 April 2001
• Docket Number: No. 2095,2095
• Citation: 770 A.2d 1072,138 Md. App. 136
• Parties: Melissa M. HALLIDAY v. STURM, RUGER & COMPANY, INC.
• Court: Court of Special Appeals of Maryland

770 A.2d 1072

138 Md. App. 136

Melissa M. HALLIDAY v. STURM, RUGER & COMPANY, INC.

No. 2095, Sept. Term, 1999.

Court of Special Appeals of Maryland.

April 25, 2001.

Andrew D. Freeman (C. Christopher Brown and Brown, Goldstein & Levy, LLP on the brief), Baltimore, for appellants.

Paul F. Strain (M. King Hill, III, and Venable, Baetjer and Howard, LLP, Baltimore, James P. Dorr, James B. Vogts and Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon, Chicago, IL, on the brief), for appellees.

Argued before MURPHY, C.J., and DAVIS, HOLLANDER, SALMON, SONNER, KENNEY, DEBORAH S. EYLER, ADKINS, and KRAUSER, JJ.

DAVIS, Judge.

Appellant Melissa M. Halliday filed an action for wrongful death and a survivor's claim in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City against appellee Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc., alleging strict liability for the self-inflicted shooting death of her three-year-old son, Jordan Garris.

Subsequent to the dismissal of all claims against the retailer of the handgun, On Target, Inc., appellee moved to dismiss, or in the alternative, sought summary judgment. On October 14, 1999, the Circuit Court for Baltimore City (Cannon, J.) granted summary judgment in favor of appellee, setting forth the basis for its ruling in a bench memorandum. From the grant of summary judgment, appellant filed this timely appeal, in which she asked questions that have been restated as follows:

I. Under Maryland law, is the "risk-utility test" applicable to handguns under a product liability claim?

II. Was the grant of summary judgment appropriate, either because the misuse of the dangerous instrumentality involved precludes any factual determination of foreseeability or because the "risk-utility test" is inapplicable?

III. When a product, by its very nature, is designed to inflict serious injury or cause death, were the appellee's warnings sufficient to establish, as a matter of law, that the handgun was misused?

FACTUAL BACKGROUND

In March 1999, Clifton Garris, Jordan's father, purchased a Ruger P89 pistol from On Target, Inc., a firearms retail store and shooting range located in Severn, Maryland. The P89 pistol is a center fire, double action, magazine-fit, automatic loading, recoil-operated handgun.

In June 1999, three months after the purchase of the P89 pistol, Jordan discovered the handgun under his parents' mattress. The gun, stored separately from the ammunition magazine, had been kept there, unlocked, to be readily available to protect the home from intruders. Young Jordan allegedly was capable of loading the ammunition magazine into the handgun because he had seen similar semi-automatic weapons loaded and fired while watching television. As he played with the loaded pistol, it accidentally discharged and the young child suffered a fatal bullet wound to the head; he died two days later. Appellant, Jordan's mother and personal representative of his estate, brought this action, alleging that the handgun failed to include a safety device, i.e., a child-resistant trigger lock, and because the warnings and instructions given to Garris were inadequate to prevent the fatal accident.

The Circuit Court for Baltimore City delivered its oral opinion from the bench, in which it opined:¹

THE COURT: This will be memorandum of opinion....

And the simple fact is, as the [appellant] has said, if the gun manufacturer put onto the gun device they've known about for a hundred years or so to make it certain that a three year old could not have fired it, the child would still be here. But they did not. So the question is really whether that failure to incert [sic] [safety device] made the gun defective under the products liability law.

There is much wrong if that's the case. Much wrong. The problem is that it's also clear the child's father knew this was also a very dangerous product. I must say my reaction to the warning argument is multiple. One, the suggestion the warnings provided were more than adequate were not impressive to me. I think the [appellant] has pointed out that this 35 paged [sic] booklet, with its warnings with respect to children, are relatively small, small type, and there is so much warning about so much; and, as I say that, I want to say I'm also equally aware of defendant's 4, [sic] the youth handgun safety action notice, which I think plaintiffs also correctly point out one can tell why it is titled, it is not directed towards [sic] three year olds. So in many ways, it seems the warnings are far from adequate. On the other hand, this is a handgun we're talking about where there is a question of whether any warning whatsoever is necessary because guns are made to kill people. That simple. Particularly a handgun such as this was not made for hunting. It was made to kill people, pure and simple.

And so there are two questions, and that is, one, was any warning necessary? And the second, if a warning was necessary, that maybe, in fact, all of these warnings that are in this 35 paged [sic] booklet are equally necessary. Because we are, again, talking about a gun designed to kill people, so the warning on page 8, for example, about ammunition that says that death, serious injury and damage can result in the use of wrong ammunition, is a warning. That arguably is warning about not keeping it around children. The warning on page 6 about manual safety says placing the safety in an intermedial position between safe and fired can result in the user thinking the pistol is in a safety or fired position when it is not.

Likewise, the warning on page 10 about firing, the one on page 11 about handling, one on unloading and sliding, malfunctioning, there are lots and lots of warnings about what could go wrong ending up in the death of or a serious injury to someone because this is a gun.

Look at it that way, the warning with respect to the children, it's more than adequate. In addition, with respect to the issue of warning and sense of danger and the sense of the need to keep the gun away from children, I think the allegations made by the [appellant], again, are relevant. The allegations made in paragraph 16 which states that [the] three year old [child] found the gun under his father's mattress, clearly an allegation that it was put there with the expectation that it would not be found by this three year old. Goes on to say his father had hidden the gun there and had removed the magazine clip containing the bullets from the gun for safety, which I think clearly is also some indication making some effort to make this inherently dangerous product safe.

But on the issue of misuse, I think there are some things that lead me to conclude in this case that in terms of the misuse or superceding intervening cause or whatever, that I think makes a motion for summary judgement [sic] in favor of the [appellee] appropriate, and that is that we're talking about a gun. And a gun, where clearly the person who purchased it knew it was dangerous by the way it was handled, and in response to the argument about the risk utility test, I think that what the Court of Special Appeals said in Keller (sic) veruss [sic] Archie Industries is that the risk utility test is applicable and only applied when something goes wrong with a product. And I think what they're talking about is not something going wrong in the sense of clearly [appellant] was right, something went wrong in the sense that a three year old was killed and that's very wrong, but not in the sense of the gun behaving the way one would predict the gun should behave, and in the sense the gun operated the way it should have, I think also, really even stronger here, is that it is a misdemeanor for someone to possess a gun, to store or leave a loaded firearm in any location where an individual knew or should have known that an unsupervised minor child would have access to it. I say that realizing that is a heavy burden for the father of the child and the mother of the child also to be stuck with. And I say that because that makes it different than the Klien [sic] case, relied upon by the [appellant], where the warning is putting one finger in the wrong place, which was not a criminal offense, nor should it have been a criminal offense, but simply was a sense of sloppy use, similar to the Elsworth [sic] case involving the nightgown which might not even be termed sloppy use, but which is predictable; but with respect to Klien [sic], it can be described as sloppy use. And I say that because I do believe the [appellant] is right, Klien [sic] does make clear that a warning by itself doesn't obviate the problem. If that really was what this case turned on, I would reach a different result, but the problem here is something, as I said, the question is whether any warning was needed; second, whether, because of the type of product it was, you need to read the manual to get all the warnings, because it was so dangerous and so deadly; and third, it is clear the child's father knew about all these dangers. And also, one way of dealing with this has to make it a criminal offense to put that gun in a place where the child would get to it.

On appeal, appellant does not pursue the claim of inadequate warnings and instructions regarding the operation of the handgun received by the elder Garris at the time of sale.

STANDARD OF REVIEW

We summarized our appellate review of a trial court's ruling on a motion for summary judgment in Bond v. NIBCO, 96 Md.App. 127, 134-36, 623 A.2d 731 (1993): Maryland Rule 2-501 provides in pertinent part:

Any party may file at any time a motion for summary judgment on all or part of an action on the ground that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and that the party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.... The response to a motion ... shall identify with particularity the material facts that are disputed.... The court shall enter judgment in favor of or against the moving party if the motion and response show that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact

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